Girl Detective

Recommended at Entertainment Weekly, Tana French’s Irish murder mystery The Likeness took a while to come in at the library. Once I started it, I realized it was a sequel–I got and finished In the Woods in a few days, then started The Likeness, worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish it by the time it was due. I needn’t have fretted.

The Likeness is at least as compelling as In the Woods, and is a tighter, better-written book to boot. I hate to use this trite phrase, but it fits: The Likeness is a taut, psychological thriller. It’s narrated by Detective Cassie Maddox, who still suffers from the events of the last book but is spurred back to risk taking when a unique investigative opportunity presents itself.

This is Lexie Madison’s story, not mine. I’d love to tell you one without getting into the other, but it doesn’t work that way. I used to think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control…

This is the main thing you need to know about Alexandra Madison: she never existed. Frank Mackey and I invented her, a long time ago

Like In the Woods, the book has wonderful, complex characters who are carefully and believably written. Cassie’s case is an involving one, and it’s easy to see how she gets in too deep. It is dark and violent, so defer it if you’re feeling fragile and depressed. But if you’re looking for a well-written murder procedural with great characters, I highly recommend starting with In the Woods and continuing with The Likeness.

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US. We have much to be grateful for at our house. G. Grod is thrilled to see the Philadelphia Eagles doing well again. He and I were grateful for pie. I’m glad to have finished my book before it’s due at the library. And the kids were grateful that I gave them bread and butter, since they refused to eat anything else I made for our only-veggie-sides-and-pie dinner.

Today’s menu:
Savory Corn Pudding, from Cook’s Country
Gingered Beets, from Sundays at Moosewood
Creamy Cauliflower Casserole with Bacon and Cheddar
Impossible Pumpkin Pie with Maple Whipped Cream

Tomorrow, I’ll attempt:

Roasted Carrots
Sweet and Sour Brussel Sprouts
Apple Pie from Cook’s Illustrated with their Foolproof Pie Dough with its secret ingredient of vodka. I’ll use a mix of local Honeycrisp and Empire apples.

Edited to update the menu. Everything turned out well, though my boys still wouldn’t eat anything. I couldn’t even bribe Guppy with two kinds of pie. I was glad to skip the sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and turkey. G. Grod and I didn’t miss them.

The connections to Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment just keep coming. S, who blogs at Puss Reboots, recently reviewed Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, which I read and very much enjoyed last year. She noted that the book, published posthumously, had been edited by Hemingway’s last wife to an unknown extent. While doing research on that point, I found Crime and Punishment named as an influence by Hemingway on the book. Hemingway’s isn’t an obvious homage, but now I knew what to look for, I found it.

Raskolnikov is a man whose guilt and crime prevent him from accepting the love of Sofya until the very end of the novel. To me, A Moveable Feast felt like a loving apology from Hemingway to his first wife Hadley; before the editing the book included an overt apology. Like Raskolnikov, Hemingway left his love for dark reasons but came to his senses much later, and asked forgiveness. Unlike Raskolnikov, though, Hemingway did not reunite with his earlier love.

As part of what’s turning into my Shakespeare/Elizabethan course of study this year, I rented Elizabeth. Like Shakespeare in Love, I saw it in the theater the year it came out. I think I enjoyed it better then, before I learned a little about film. The performances are strong, particularly Blanchett’s and Geoffrey Rush’s, and the costumes are spectacular. I’d forgotten Daniel Craig in the cast. Yet too often I felt as if I were watching a music video rather than an historical movie–the visuals were too splashy. Additionally, the story was hardly subtle. Like Shakespeare’s history plays, the heroes and villains are not complex. Instead they’re so starkly defined they’re almost caricatures. Elizabeth was pretty to look at, so-so on historical accuracy, and mostly entertaining. Worth watching, though not what I’d call a great film.

Compared to Shakespeare in Love, I thought Elizabeth had a worse performance from Joseph Fiennes, but a better one from Blanchett than from Gwyneth Paltrow, who took home the Best Actress Oscar that year.

I was thrilled when Tana French’s The Likeness finally came into the library for me; I’d seen it praised several times. I was less thrilled when I realized it was a sequel, when I started it anyway, and when some critical points from the first one were divulged. So off I went to Target for In the Woods, since it still has a wait list at the library, too.

In the Woods is narrated by Rob Ryan, a homicide detective in Ireland. He and his partner Cassie volunteer to investigate the murder of a pre-teen girl. The case bears suspicious resemblances to a missing children case from twenty years before, one in which Rob was involved.

What I want you to remember is that I’m a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception…

This is my job, and you don’t go into it–or if you do, you don’t last–without some natural affinity for its priorities and demands. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this–two things. I crave truth. And I lie.

This is an engrossing procedural, with excellent psychological characterizations. Dark and grim, though, it’s not fun or escapist, if that’s what you’re looking for. For those who have read the book and want to know more about an item mentioned at the very end, see here.

Will I be able to finish both books by the time I have to return The Likeness, which is non-renewable? We shall see. But judging by In the Woods, which I finished in about 5 days, I think I’m gonna make it.

Sean Penn’s Into the Wild finally came into the library for me. It’s a road movie about a college graduate who forgoes the materialistic world of his unhappy family and sets off for Alaska. Though it jumps around in time, the story is easy to follow. Emile Hirsch is frighteningly convincing as Chris McCandless, who tumbles from bright idealism into gaunt, frightened loneliness. And the supporting cast is quite strong, which helps carry the 138 minute movie through to its end. Beautiful, though perhaps overlong, it mostly resists preaching, and simply shows the internal and external journeys of McCandless.

Two thoughts:

One, I find Hirsch looks distractingly like several other actors: Brian Austin Green and Thomas Dekker from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Zac Efron of the High School Musicals.

Two, Sean Penn’s films tend to revolve around dead or doomed children. It’s a strange theme to own.

This month’s pick for my book group, The Return of the Dancing Master, is an engaging procedural mystery by Swedish writer Henning Mankell, best known for his Kurt Wallender series, soon to be televised by the BBC.

The prologue takes place at the end of the second world war, then jumps 54 years to the home of Herbert Molin. There is a brutal murder, bad things happen, and the narration stays mostly with Stefan Lindman, a policeman who used to work with Molin. Lindman’s reeling from a recent diagnosis of cancer, and lets himself be drawn into the investigation.

At least once every year he found himself in situations where he experienced considerable fear. One one occasion he’d been attacked by a psychopath weighing over 300 pounds. He had been on the floor with the man astride him, and in rising desperation had fought to prevent his head from being torn off by the madman’s gigantic hands…Another time he’d been shot at while approaching a house to deal with domestic violence…But he had never been as frightened as he felt now, on the morning of October 25, 1999, as he lay in bed staring up at the ceiling.

Detailed and not predictable, the mystery unfolds at as measured a pace as the reader can manage–I raced through the book in a few days. It paints a disturbing picture of post-war Swedes hiding ugly secrets in the wake of the Holocaust.

In the New Yorker, Joan Acocella summarizes concerns about over-parenting from several books, many of them not new. As I read the five-page article, my annoyance grew. Who _isn’t_ against overparenting, except those who are too oblivious to realize they’re doing it? And isn’t this truly a small number, hardly the epidemic that articles like this about books like these imply?

A final question that one has to ask is whether the overparenting trend is truly the emergency that these authors say it is. In the manner of popular books on psychology, the commentators tend to forget that they are talking, for the most part, about a minority.

Further, my experience says it’s a no-win situation. I’ve been criticized for over-parenting, and I’ve been criticized for under-parenting. In the end, I quietly remind myself that I’m the one who spends almost all day every day with my kids. Mother knows best, and is doing her best. I do not need a book, or an article, to scare me to the other side of the parenting continuum, thank you. These books aren’t there to help parents. On the contrary, they seem more likely to result in an increased culture of judgment against parents. Not helpful. (Link from Blog of a Bookslut)

G. Grod asked for an apple pie several weeks ago. I finally worked up the nerve–I don’t think I’ve ever made an apple pie, or a double crust pie. It’s definitely a make-ahead; it takes at least 4 hours to cool.

I used different recipes from Cook’s Illustrated for the pie and the dough, which has a secret ingredient. It’s not a pretty pie, but it smells good. I’ll be serving it with Cedar Summit’s cinnamon ice cream.

Like Ex Machina, 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso is another comic I stopped buying monthly and instead get the graphic novel collections. That didn’t help me much with “Dirty“, though.

There was not a unifying story to this group of issues, and it felt very “been there, done that” with this series: blood, violence, sex, death. All of which can be powerful forces when used carefully in telling a story. Here, though, it feels like they’re being tossed up to meet a deadline, or fill in issues as the series moves to its conclusion. I really enjoyed this series, and thought it was a great modern crime story. As it’s gone on, though, my appreciation has waned. Is it me, is it the series? I don’t know. I’ll read till the end, and hope the creators are able to pull things together in a satisfying way. “Dirty” though, is an apt description of a weak entry in a once-strong series.

Ex Machina, written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Tony Harris, is one of the comic books I stopped buying monthly. Instead, I read the graphic novel story collections. They are free of intrusive, obnoxious ads, and have a self-contained story that I’m better able to appreciate in one sitting then spread out over months.

In “Ex Cathedra“, New York mayor Mitchell Hundred is summoned to an audience with the pope. As usual for this series, the episodes of ongoing story are introduced with flashbacks to Hundred’s past as the crime fighter The Great Machine, or to the lives of the series’ supporting characters. The story with the pope has some interesting wrinkles, and it’s paralleled by a less successful subplot of nasty Russian criminals. At which I wondered, “Russians? Really?” just like the characters in Burn After Reading did.

In spite of the odd villain choice, “Ex Cathedra” is a strong, engaging entry in one of the best series on comic shelves today.

Seeing Bond movies on opening night has become a tradition for my husband G. Grod and me; we saw Goldeneye on our second date, almost exactly thirteen years ago. Quantum of Solace, the newest Bond movie, disappoints, but still entertains. It’s a step down from Casino Royale, but still a reasonable entry in the Bond oeuvre, which was never meant to be high art.

Daniel Craig is handsome and brooding, Judi Dench is classy and stern, Mathieu Amalric as the villain is especially good. He’s all the more scary for not being a cartoon, as are most Bond villains. The Bond girls are by the book, as are the opening song and montage–meh. The action sequences are terrible, perhaps unsurprising given the director’s indie-film experience. As Hollywood learned last year with the Chris Weitz directed Golden Compass, you can’t just slap a small-film director, no matter how talented, on a big-budget action film. The story also suffers in the telling, becoming muddied and even boring.

Complaints about the film, as in this review from the NYT’s A.O. Scott, are that Bond is too brooding, and the film is too Bourne-like–the final scene is an out-and-out homage to the final scene in The Bourne Identity. Based on what happens in QoS, I suspect we’ll see a return to the more charming and urbane Bond in the next film. But Bond is always a reflection of his times. I don’t find it incongruous that he’s more dark and violent. He still looks good in a tux.

As part of what appears to be my ongoing “unit” of Shakespeare, I re-watched Shakespeare in Love for the first time since seeing it in the theater ten years ago.

The Best Picture winner holds up well. Fiennes and Paltrow are pretty and charming in the leads; Paltrow won the Oscar for Best Actress that year. (I thought it should have gone to Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth.) Rupert Everett gets far too little screen time as Christopher Marlowe, while Ben Affleck gets too much as player Ned Alleyne. Tom Wilkinson, Geoffry Rush, and Imelda Staunton excel in supporting roles, while Colin Firth is a good sport, playing the foppish bad guy, an ironic contrast to his turn as Mr. Darcy, I think. Judi Dench as Elizabeth steals every scene she’s in and won the supporting actress Oscar for about eleven minutes of screen time. (I thought that Oscar should have gone to Lynn Redgrave from Gods and Monsters.)

By turns comic, tragic and romantic, SiL is a fitting homage to the work of Shakespeare. True to its roots, it is an entertainment. It combines history with the plays Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night to good effect. Tom Stoppard polished the screenplay; his is a funny, informed post-modern influence, as in this oft-repeated exchange:

“It will all turn out well.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

SiL is fun and touching, but not to be taken as fact–it’s a pleasing fiction, based on the work of others, like Shakespeare’s own works.

For a few weeks now, my husband G. Grod and I have made the same joke when the boys, 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy, are being especially difficult.

“I wonder how far it is to Nebraska?”

It’s in bad taste, but it helps break the tension. Turns out, though, it’s not much of a joke. Nebraska recently instated a safe-haven law; it allows infants to be dropped off at hospitals without prosecution of the dropper off, usually a teen or single parent. The law in Nebraska did not include an age limit, though. This loophole was made apparent when a man dropped off nine children, aged one to seventeen. Since its inception, thirty four children have been dropped off, none of them infants.

Like G. and I have noticed, the law is an easy target for the jokes. But the reason people are dropping off kids is sad, not funny. Raising kids is hard, and in the USA’s increasingly independent and me-focused culture, there’s not much help to be had. Like many, G and I live far from family; we’re lucky to have a community of friends for help.

So next time you see a kid melting down, and a tired or cranky-looking parent, offer help, not judgment. Politely looking away isn’t helpful, either. Empathy, though, is a wonderful thing–take it from this tired, cranky parent.

The tagline for Christopher Rush’s Will is “After 400 years, Shakespeare breaks his silence.” Rush imagines Shakespeare on his death bed, dictating his will to his lawyer. In between bequests, he tells the lawyer the story of his life. At first, the conceit felt artificial, but compared to what? Two star-crossed lovers in Verona? Mysterious shipwrecks? It bothered me initially, but it made sense for a playwright’s telling of his own story, and was further shored up by an elaboration near the end of the book.

What can you say? What can you do, when you’re sick and tired, and your lawyer is pawing the floorboards like a little black bull? You get down to it, of course, just as he directs….

But for you, my masters, my shadows, my audience, my charmed circle, for you it’s different. Desire, not business is your theme. Huddle up then, come close, forget [the lawyer], and tell me what you’d like to hear. A speech of quality, no doubt, before this humdrum legalese? I can do you anything, gentle friends, any exit peiece you care to name–tomorrow and tomorrow, never never never, ripeness is all, the rest is silence. The simplest words worked best, put into the mouths of doomed and dying mortals, words that made even the groundlings stop scratching, stand still and wet their cheeks, like trees bedashed with rain.

Rush takes the impressive risk of ventriloquizing Shakespeare and spins the few hard facts about his life into a sprawling 460-page tale, by turns harrowing, hilarious, bawdy, and heartbreaking.
Will is an exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, imagination of Shakespeare’s entire life. Rush notes in the acknowledgments that the book grew underground for nearly fifty years; given its scope I’m not surprised. It offers hints and ideas to answer questions scholars have been arguing for centuries. It’s filled with possible inspirations and influences for his famous plays and poems, many of which are lovingly quoted and contextualized. This is an impressive idea, well executed, that fans of Shakespeare’s plays will likely appreciate and enjoy.

Minnesota food critic Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl recommends Porter and Frye for “The Big Birthday” in November’s issue of Minnesota Monthly (Online article doesn’t include P & F.) To celebrate a similar big event–G. Grod’s and my tenth wedding anniversary–my generous family treated us to dinner at Porter and Frye in downtown Minneapolis’ Ivy hotel. Beforehand, the restaurant called to find out our likes, dislikes, foods to avoid, and foods to include (foie gras, for G. and me), then they crafted a menu and an accompanying wine flight just for us.

We were seated at the cozy circular booth tucked into the stairwell. Service was knowledgeable, personable, attentive but never oppressive. And the meal. Oh, my. Chef Josh Habiger (his Flickr page has lots of beautiful food pics to ogle) and his team hit it out of the park: king-crab salad with Japanese pepper and vanilla foam in a martini glass; pressed roasted squash in a brilliant green tarragon sauce with little gumdrop-shaped nuggets of ripe, local pear caramelized on their tiny bottoms; foie gras with concord grape jam and sorbet, with buttered toast to sop up every last delicious morsel; veal sweetbreads with flash fried chard that dissolved in my mouth plus a savory sauteed chard; duck with mustard, figs and duck-fat sauteed parsnips; pork tenderloin and belly with a perfectly non-sweet gingerbread, and a sweet potato puree so light and fluffy I could not fathom the science involved in getting it that way (and they didn’t tell me); raspberry and chili pepper sorbet, and cream cheese ice cream alongside a chocolate, cherry and vanilla pastry.

We had the seven-course meal. It was a lot of food, but I cannot name a course I would have skipped. Our tenth anniversary dinner was filled with beautiful plates of delicious, high-quality food prepared with mind-boggling creativity and cutting-edge techniques. I’ll cherish the memory of this meal for a long time.

Edited to add all sorts of links. Be sure to look at the food photos; they make me awestruck and hungry at the same time.

Doesn’t it seem like post-Halloween is too soon for holiday decorations and best-of lists?

In any case, Publishers Weekly has their picks for the year in several categories: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, mystery, sci fi, kids and more. I’ve read only one from the fiction list, My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru, which I recommend. (Link from Minnesota Reads)

I left out two important things from my recent post on Macbeth.

One, a taste of the play itself. The witches get many of the good lines, but Lady Macbeth’s speeches stirred me most:

…Come, you Spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse;
That no compunctious visitings of Nature
Shake my fell purpose, no keep peace between
Th’effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on Nature’s mischief! Come, thick Night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’ (I. v. 40-54)

Also, as I did with Hamlet, I saw details in Macbeth that I think Dostoevsky echoes in Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov: a murderer torn by doubt, whose guilt nearly destroys him, but who eventually acknowledges his deed and seizes back his own destiny. Macbeth and Raskolnikov met with very different fates, perhaps because they had very different women by their sides–Macbeth’s ambitious Lady M versus Raskolnikov’s hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Sofya. Since many things in Macbeth echo those in Hamlet (e.g., Lady Macbeth’s wish to “pour my spirits in thine ear,” I. v. 26), I’m not surprised to find echoes of both in the later Russian work. I hope, in my not-very-copious free time, to research this Shakespeare/Dostoevsky connection I detect.

In preparation for seeing the Torch Theater production, I re-read Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As with Hamlet, I was struck by how many lines continue to be quoted (sometimes incorrectly) hundreds of years later. The plot is familiar to most, even those who have never read the play. The particulars, though, drew me through the story. I noted Macbeth’s vacillation, so like Hamlet’s in that earlier, and IMO better, tragedy. I appreciated the crowd-pleasing breather of the drunken porter scene, and was annoyed by my edition; it debates the provenance of almost every passage in “Macbeth”, but doesn’t bother to speculate on “nose painting.” Overall, though, I appreciated the notes detailing the centuries-long debate over what parts of the play Shakespeare wrote, what he didn’t, etc.

As for the story as a whole, I contrast Macbeth’s change over the play, from hero to doubter to outward embracer of his role as villain, with that of Lady Macbeth, who is constant from first learning of the prophecy, yet shatters on the interior from the stress of her misdeeds in the service of her ambition. Macbeth and his lady balance one another, even as they plunge down a slippery slope of morality to their demises.

Macbeth and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: I’ve noted some similarities of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Shakespeare before, in my reading of Titus Andronicus. G. Grod and I were watching BtVS Season 2* on DVD while I read Macbeth. Creator Joss Whedon, in his commentary on the season’s (and perhaps the series’) pivotal two episodes, “Surprise” and “Innocence,” states his preference for psychology in the service of a tale. He wants to add realistic touches to supernatural elements to create a fantastic yet believable story. He offered as examples the star-crossed lovers Angel, the vampire with a soul, and Buffy, the slayer who’s in love with a vampire.

I find an echo in Whedon’s comments to those of Kenneth Muir in the Macbeth Introduction:

Shakespeare was not so much concerned with the creation of real human beings, but with theatrical or poetical effect. He was fascinated by the very difficulty of making the psychologically improbable, by sheer virtuosity, appear possible. Shakespeare made ‘the bold experiment of a character with a strongly marked mixture of qualities of which the one seems almost to preclude the other’–a brave warrior who is a moral coward, a brutal murderer who is racked by feelings of guilt, and so on. (Intro, xlvii)

Macbeth, Torch Theater, 1 November 2008: The irony of seeing Macbeth on All Saints Day amused me. This production was on a small scale, but with two locally renowned actors, Stacia Rice and Sean Haberle, in the lead roles. The supporting roles were filled with actors of varying skill. Macduff was effective, I found, while Malcolm was not. Still, the power of the story combined with its strong actors made for an stirring show.** Star Tribune review here, City Pages review here.

For a geeky variation on “Macbeth”, see Theresa and Patrick Nielson-Hayden’s excellent blog Making Light.

*Query: is Buffy Season 2 one of the best seasons of TV ever? Discuss.

**My favorable impression of the play may have been enhanced by the kind usher who told me my outfit was really working for me (I wore these shoes), and because I was basking in the aftermath of a fabulous meal from Nick and Eddie’s.

Neil Gaiman’s new picture book, illustrated by Gris Grimly is the frightfully entertaining Dangerous Alphabet. It is not, however, for the squeamish or faint of heart.

A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain…featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastinesses, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.

The text and illustrations might scare some children, but my two boys, 2 and 5 years old, love this book. The tale unfolds visually, with finely etched painted drawings accompanied by Gaiman’s rhyming couplets. There are a lot of clumsy rhyming books, but Gaiman, with a background in Shakespeare, executes seamless and flowing poetry. Often, though, Grimly’s detailed illustrations cause the boys and me to pause, which interrupts the rhyme of the couplet. It’s a nice problem to have. As with many alphabet books, there are more items on each page than are named. I would guess it’s unique, though, in its depiction of maggots and meat on the M page. I see something new each time I read the book.

The Dangerous Alphabet is great fun for fans of ghoulish humor books for kids, like those of Roald Dahl, Edward Gorey or Lemony Snicket. Others might want to keep their distance. And thus their lunch.